Saturday, November 24, 2012

Thursday, November 22, 2012

As the negotiations are getting underway for COP 18 in Doha, commentators have started making their noises. Usual noises, following a well-known, worn-out script. Fiona Harvey in the Guardian writes under the headline

The gap between the carbon emission cuts pledged and the cuts scientists say are needed has widened, report warns
quoting 'warnings' from those in the business who know. Warnings about the gap between what needs to be done in terms of GHG reductions and actual achievements. UNEP director Steiner and UN

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Stephen Turner, a professor of philosophy at the University of South Florida has published a thought provoking article in Minerva. The title "normal accidents" in the title of his paper refers to a concept developed by organisational sociologist Charles Perrow who wrote a book with the same title in which he claimed that some technologies inevitably produce accidents. This is the case when systems are complex and tightly coupled (see above for the 2x2 matrix which shows the four combinations). Perrow's examples are technological disasters which happened in chemical or nuclear plants. If something goes wrong in one part of the system the fault will propagate through the whole system and lead to unpredictable, sometimes catastrophic consequences. Lose coupling would prevent the spreading of such failures, they are more forgiving.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Last night BBC radio 4 had an half hour feature which you can listen to here. There is a selection of statements from the likes of Michael Mann, Steve McIntyre, Andrew Montford, Bob Ward, Fiona Harvey, Mike Hulme, among others. Interesting is the opinion voiced by some that there was a period of openness in the climate science community following in the months after Climategate, but that this period is over--it has given way to a retrenchment. However, published research in the climate sciences emphasizes uncertainties more than before, as Mike Hulme observes. Finally, the detective superintendent police officer investigating the case concludes that we do not know if the data was hacked or leaked. In a few weeks the legal powers to prosecute will cease so maybe the real email hacker/leaker will step forward.

Scientific American has put up a detailed explanation of why hurricane Sandy may be linked to anthropogenic
climate change: a chain of events that, critically, involves the
North Atlantic Oscillation nudged towards a negative state by the
melting of Arctic sea-ice. On the other hand, realclimate explained
in 2007 that climate change was threatening the Mediterranean
region with more severe droughts because climate change would nudge
the North Atlantic Oscillation towards a positive state. The
IPCC model suite of 2007 would show these trends very clearly.

This seems harder to understand than
the wave-particle dualism, but the explanation is easy: both arguments are realizations of a certain sort of climate noise.

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